Some connections between (digital) books and music

Just dumping some thoughts and links and connections about books and music in the digital world that I’ve noticed recently.

With the recent UK launch of the Kindle the news outlets were writing and talking a lot about digital books including the usual worries about piracy, DRM and price points (at the moment they seem to be priced similarly to physical books despite no printing or distribution costs). Which is the same set of things that the music industry went through years ago and which has now just about settled down, generally in favour of the consumer.

And I suspect the publishing industry will need to address some of the other problems we’re seeing in digital music - things like unique identifiers, search, content resolution and distribution. Which leads me to some things that all seem to link together somehow.

XSPF is a standard format for describing music playlists but Michael tweeted about the possibility of using it for lists of books - ‘xspf spec “An XSPF playlist describes a sequence of objects to be rendered. Objects might be audio, video, text, playlists or any other media type” erm, book lists?’

Playdar is a music content resolver which has been getting a lot of coverage recently - give it a song name and it will search for it on your hard disk, across all your computers, on your intranet and across music services on the internet. The latest README on Playdar says…

"Depending on the plugins loaded, Playdar could be used to resolve anything.
Here's a fictional example query for an academic essay:
{
   "qid"    : "XXX789",
   "author" : "Jonathan swift",
   "year"   : 1729,
   "title"  : "a modest propsal"
}
... and if you have a resolver plugin that could search for essays and academic
papers, it might respond like this:
{
   "sid"    : "YYY123",
   "qid"    : "XXX789",
   "result" : {
       "author" : "Jonathan Swift",
       "year"   : 1729,
       "title"  : "A Modest Proposal",
       "score"  : 1.00,
       "category"   : "humour",
       "url"    : "http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html"
   }
}
In this example, the resolver matched the query to an essay posted on the web
instead of the local filesystem."

Could we have content resolution for books, essays and academic papers?

And finally, maybe bringing some of these together, there’s the recently announced Internet Archive’s BookServer which is, as I understand it, a federated search architecture for discovering, buying or borrowing digital books. There’s a little more explanation of it in this presentation but not a huge amount of detail yet.